Regarding that last boost, I'm starting to conceive of LLMs and image generators as a phenomenon of (American) society eating its seed corn. If you're not familiar with the phrase, "seed corn" is the corn you set aside to plant next year, as opposed to the corn you eat this year. If you eat your seed corn this year, you have no seeds to plant next year, and thus create a crisis for all future years, a crisis that could have been avoided with better management.
LLMs and image generators mass ingest human-created texts and images. Since the human creators of the ingested texts and images are not compensated and not even credited, this ingestion puts negative pressure on the sharing of such things. Creative acts functioning as seed for future creative acts becomes depressed. Creative people will have little choice but to lock down, charge for, or hide their works. Otherwise, they'll be ingested by innumerable computer programs and replicated ad infinitum without so much as a credit attached. Seed corn that had been freely given forward will become difficult to get. Eaten.
Eating your seed corn is meant to be a last ditch act you take out of desperation after exhausting all other options. It's not meant to be standard operating procedure. What a bleak society that does this, consuming itself in essence.
To put it differently, these tools and techniques are drawing out the value of works created by creative people without replenishing the originators of that value. That's a horribly dehumanizing way of looking at it, as if people were value spigots, but that's the problem isn't it? This is a dehumanzing arrangement. We don't need to be doing this.
Well well well... Andreessen Horowitz admits, in no uncertain terms, that if they had to compensate artists for using their art to train their #aiart ripoff models, that their investments wouldn't be worth it.
Absolutely damning admission which spells out in no uncertain terms that these firms KNOW they are ripping artists off.
Since their arrival, generative AI models and their trainers have demonstrated their ability to download any online content for model training. For content owners and creators, few tools can prevent their content from being fed into a generative AI model against their will. Opt-out lists have been disregarded by model trainers in the past, and can be easily ignored with zero consequences. They are unverifiable and unenforceable, and those who violate opt-out lists and do-not-scrape directives can not be identified with high confidence.
In an effort to address this power asymmetry, we have designed and implemented Nightshade, a tool that turns any image into a data sample that is unsuitable for model training. More precisely, Nightshade transforms images into "poison" samples, so that models training on them without consent will see their models learn unpredictable behaviors that deviate from expected norms, e.g. a prompt that asks for an image of a cow flying in space might instead get an image of a handbag floating in space.
Chinese media has reported that last month, the Guangzhou Internet Court held that an AI image generation service had infringed copyright in images of Ultraman by generating its own Ultraman images using an AI model.
I can't seem to locate the actual text of the judgment though, it's not on China Judgments Online.
This excellent comic on the history of Luddism by Tom Humberstone https://thenib.com/im-a-luddite led me to this site with folks developing 'Glaze' which is a thing artists are using to mess with AI trying to scrape their art. Check it out here:
Greg Rutkwoski requested to have his art removed from Stable Diffusion. Once it was, the image generation community created their own tool trained on his artwork that the company can’t do anything about. AI “artists” have no respect for real artists.
Among the many reasons we should resist the widespread application of generative #AI an important, if less concrete, one is to preserve the freedom to change. This class of method crystallizes the past and present and re-generates it over and over again. The net result, if it's used en masse, is foreclosing the future.
If you're stats-poisoned: human flourishing requires the joint distribution of the future to be different from that of the past and present. We, collectively, form a non-stationary system, and forcing the human system to be stationary is a kind of violence.
Harvard's metaLab has launched https://aipedagogy.org, a resource chock full of tasty assignments by trailblazers of generative AI in the classroom. (My own "AI Sandwich" is also on the menu.)
I've already stolen Juliana Castro's "Illustrate a Hoax" for my own class!